Jobs are everything to the economy. Period. Job growth, however, is not uniform across the country. As usual, I invoke the TINSTAANREM axiom — There Is No Such Thing As A National Real Estate Market. Nor is job growth the same nationwide. But where job growth is strong, so is the demand for real estate.

The following table lists the top-20 Metropolitan Statistical Areas (MSAs) and Divisions (out of a total 436) with the largest percentage gain in jobs in the 12-months ending July 2018. These data are Seasonally Adjusted Annualized numbers provided by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics

Each of the top-20 job growth rates was more than double the 1.64 percent level recorded by the U.S. for the same period. Only one of the top-20 had more than one million jobs – Orlando.

As always, for all the winners there are losers. The worst performing MSA and Divisions in the past 12-months are shown in the next table. All of these are relatively smaller cites having less than 200,000 total jobs.

The next table shows the 20-MSAs and Divisions with the largest total increase in net-new jobs in the 12-months ending July 2018. There is some overlap in this group. The Dallas-Ft Worth-Arlington is ranked number one in net-new job gains, while a subset of this market, the Dallas-Plano-Irving Metro Division, ranked third. Seven of the 20 MSAs and Divisions with the largest gain in net-new jobs also posted a percentage gain greater than 3.0 percent – impressive economic performance for larger cities.